Dr. Dollins received her PhD in Genetics and Genomics from Duke University Medical Center, after which she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Dr. Dollins subsequently joined the US Food and Drug Administration’s Office of In Vitro Diagnostics and Radio­logical Health as a senior reviewer and subsequently as acting branch chief, gaining experience in the regulatory review practices and policies that govern in vitro diagnostic and companion diagnostic regulatory review. Upon leaving FDA, Dr. Dollins joined Merck KGaA as the Associate Director of Regulatory Affairs, Companion Diagnostics.

A.R. Thierry is Director of Research at the INSERM in the Institute of Research of Cancerology of Montpellier, France. His research interest focuses on the study of the diagnostic capacity of circulating DNA and the development of methods towards supporting personalised medicine. A.R. Thierry has coor­dinated a prospective blinded multicentric studies showing the first clinical validation and demonstration of clinical utility of the plasma DNA analysis in oncology, by detecting point mutations in KRAS and BRAF from colorectal patients. He is one of the world leaders in the clinical application of the analy­sis of circulating DNA and now he is directing various studies on prognosis, cancer patient follow up and cancer screening. He is the principal founder of DiaDx, a Biotech company devoted to liquid biopsy solutions in oncology.

In his role, Jonathan works closely with a broad range of European, North American and EMEA oncology-focussed companies & quality assurance schemes with the goal of driving the standardization and normalization of molecular assays across the globe. One question he is keen to explore is whether it is possible to replace patient samples in clinical trials with contrived samples in the next 10 – 20 years? Jonathan holds a PhD from the University of Sussex in genomic DNA damage and stability and has extensive business development and product development experience through previous roles including Cambridge-based antibody company Abcam.

Dr. Holt is the Biomarker Services Manager at Hologic. He has over 20 years’ experience of genomics research and has spent the last 10 years working in biomarker based contract research. Bobs current focus is on personalised medicine and the development of companion diagnostic products for pharmaceutical clients. Dr. Holt has considerable experi­ence of diagnostic product development, from early biomarker discov­ery through to the development of diagnostic products, his primary re­sponsibilities include companion diagnostic development, discovery and validation of biomarkers and assays in support of personalised medi­cine studies. Bob has an undergraduate degree from the University of Dundee and a PhD. from the University of Liverpool. Additionally, he has authored several key biomarker publications in peer-reviewed journals as is an inventor on a number of biomarker patents.